A Survey of Best Practices in Leadership Development

Here is a summary of 14 articles related to best practices in leadership development (LD). I’m using these summaries to see what’s out there, benchmark my work, and learn a few new things.

There are many good ideas here for LD, coaching, and training. How do your LD practices compare? Where are your opportunities for improvement? Which will work best for you and your organization?

I have listed the titles and authors so you can read them for yourself in full if you so choose. I hope you find these summaries thought-provoking, and that they help you move toward some of these best practices in leadership development!

Tie LD to real on-the-job projects that have a business impact and improve learning

Make major business projects an LD opportunity as well; integrate LD components into the projects

Overlooking context: Success in one situation doesn’t guarantee success in another. One size doesn’t fit all. Be clear on what your program is for—and focus on a few key/strategic/targeted competencies.

Decoupling reflection from real work: Tie LD to real on-the-job projects that have a business impact and improve learning.

Underestimating mind-sets (why leaders act the way they do): Identifying “below the surface” thoughts, feelings, assumptions, and beliefs is usually a precondition of behavioral change.

Failing to measure results: Metrics enable you to track progress, make improvements, and validate your LD programs. You can monitor behavior (360 feedback), career development after training, ROI on action learning projects, departmental or regional results, business impact, productivity, etc.

Nine Best Practices of Leadership Development
Patricia Dammann (instituteod.com, 2014)
[read it here]

Moving from competency based development to “vertical” development, i.e., the stages that people go through as they grow mentally [and career progression up through the levels of leadership]

Leading in the 21st Century
Barton, Grant, and Horn (McKinsey Quarterly, 2012)
[read it here]

Six global leaders (CEO’s) confront the personal and professional challenges of a new era of uncertainty.

Leaders are operating in a bewildering new environment in which little is certain, the tempo is quicker, and the dynamics are more complex — a volatile, globalized, hyper-connected age.

View the world through two lenses: a telescope, to consider opportunities far into the future, and a microscope, to scrutinize challenges of the moment at intense magnification—and shift back and forth with speed & ease

Like “tri-sector athletes,” leaders must able to engage & collaborate across the private, public, and social sectors

The 2016 Deloitte Human Capital Trends Report states that executives and HR leaders are “focused on understanding and creating a shared culture, designing a work environment that engages people, and constructing a new model of leadership and career development”

The biggest portion of T&D is on LD

More than half of all issued training and learning hours are instructor-led classroom training. Self-paced online is 19% and instructor-led online is 9%

An ATD study noted that humans crave interaction, and tend to learn better in live environments. Behaviour & body language enrich the learning process with information and memorable experiences

Leadership Development: The Six Best Practices
Josh Bersin (joshbersin.com, 2008)
[read it here]

Develop strong executive engagement in and commitment to LD [make senior leaders part of the solution]

Integrate LD with talent management: LD has to be aligned with and supported by succession planning, performance management, recruitment, and selection

A Few Key Stats on Leadership and LD

These stats came from the articles cited above:

Research has shown that when companies spend more time and money on training they have lower turnover rates, more top-performing employees, higher promotion rates and overall higher engagement and satisfaction. (Darleen Derosa, Business2Community, 2015)

DDI research found that companies with high leadership qualities were six times more likely to be among the top 20 financial performers of all organizations, and those boasting high levels of leader engagement and retention, and strong leadership qualities, were nine times more likely to outperform their peers financially. (Isabel Williams, switchandshift.com, 2015)

Companies spent more than $24 billion on leadership and management training worldwide in 2013, an increase of 15% from 2012. What’s the ROI on that investment? (Ashkenas & Hausmann, HBR, 2016).

According to the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends 2015 Report, only 18% of programs are held accountable for identifying & developing successors. (Howard Prager, www.td.org, 2016)

Technology-based training is up to 90% less expensive than traditional classroom based training. It cuts down on the time employees spend traveling as well as travel expenses (airfare, gas, mileage, hotel rooms, food). (Darleen Derosa, Business2Community, 2015)

US companies alone spend almost $14 billion annually on leadership development. Colleges and universities offer hundreds of degree courses on leadership, and the cost of customized leadership development offerings from a top business school can reach $150,000 a person… Only 7% of senior managers polled by a UK business school think that their companies develop global leaders effectively, and around 30% of US companies admit that they have failed to exploit their international business opportunities fully because they lack enough leaders with the right capabilities. (McKinsey 2014)

A 2012 poll by the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University showed that as many as 70% of Americans blame leadership crisis as a factor in the national economic decline. (Isabel Williams, switchandshift.com, 2015)

The 2016 Deloitte Human Capital Trends Report noted that 89% of executives “rated the need to strengthen, re-engineer, and improve organizational leadership” as important or very important. (ERC)

ATD’s State of the Industry Report stated that the average direct expenditure on T&D per employee per year is $1,229 (32.4 learning hours per year), and high-performing companies spend more. (ERC)

Post-training practice (practicing and using what you have learned) can improve learning effectiveness by 917%. (Mark Forman, Decisive Performance)

A Few Key Quotes on Leadership and LD

These quotes came from the articles cited above:

“The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is not training them and keeping them” (Zig Ziglar)

“Luck is when preparation meets opportunity” (Seneca) – LD is all about living at the intersection of preparation and opportunity. It’s our job to ensure leaders are prepared and have great opportunities for development. (Ian Ziskin, hrps.org, 2015)

Resilient leaders are those who have ambition for a cause greater than themselves. (Shimon Peres)

“Learning is part of economic survival for most of us”, and if businesses don’t make an effort to continuously re-skill employees, they will fall behind. (Josh Bersin, Forbes)

I am not claiming any of this material for my own. I encourage you to read these and other articles on the best practices in leadership development for yourself. I also did some editing to make it easier to read in this format.

Harvested by Joel Shapiro, Ph.D.

Joel Shapiro is a leadership educator and culture guru with Incrementa Consulting in Calgary, Canada. Joel is passionate about developing leadership capacity, making employees part of the solution, and finding the perfect blend of humanity and business performance. You can read more of Joel’s thoughts on the Incrementa website and on Twitter.